7/02/2008

future questions

6·17·08everything is beautiful, and i blame you.

make a list of neat biological phenomena; extremophiles, bacteriophages, viroids, those fish that have developed two sets of eyes separately, etc.

do you wonder why change is both so necessary, and so exciting, and yet so intimidating and difficult, all at the same time? do you wonder if change is the only way to really enjoy the world? do you wonder if routine is the antithesis of life? i mean, why else would prison be punishment.

are the navier stokes equations consistent with skipping stones off the surface of water?why do stones skip on water?and look at the focal plane for various wavelengths of light through the same lens. do shorter wavelengths lie in front of or behind the focal plane of longer wavelengths?

a further complication in the concept of an infinitely large/long universe producing all outcomes is that the idea of independent events is confounded by causality. i suppose relativity puts limits on the size (spatial and temporal) of causal events. i guess the question would be, as we expand the size of our volume of spacetime, how does the probability state space grow? in other words, if we limit ourselves to all possible events in a one cubic meter sphere of spacetime (and its corresponding time, which would be very brief), we get a finite number of possible events. we could imagine there exists a much larger volume of spacetime, that, given random events occurring as fast as they possibly can, would in some amount of time have an arbitrary chance of reproducing a given outcome. now if we were to grow our sphere of observation to include a much large spacetime interval, say, a light second, or everything in a 186,000 mile radius, then how much larger in space and or time must the second sphere be in order to again reproduce a given outcome with arbitrary probability?

furthermore, it seems even more difficult given that i am the product of 3.5 billion years of evolution, and so i am causally linked to virtually the entire universe in some sense, since any event within 3.5 billion light years could have had a causal effect on my existence here now, at least in principle.

on the other hand, global warming could turn out to be a 21st century CFCs, which it seems were indeed very important, and well understood by the scientific community, even if only after the fact.

a personal sense of spirituality or religiousness is certainly far more tolerable than the mainstream religions. and in fact the most popular religions are certainly the most dangerous as well, islam and christianity are both very large, with islam growing very rapidly, and possibly stands to be more dangerous.

as Schopenhauer's melancholy outlook expressed, one need only compare the emotional/mental state of an animal eating a meal, to the corresponding state of the animal being eaten to realize that some level of sadness has pervaded all time and space within which carnivorous animals have existed on this planet.we might suppose that most suffering in the world is the product of such natural struggles, however we have conquered such struggles, and nearly any human who succumbs to another animal's lunch is overwhelmingly likely to have been taking a large risk, and so such sadness neednt be requisite in our culture any longer. life is, typically, a struggle for survival. but thanks to our big brains, humans have eliminated most of the struggle, very largely through the continuous and ever more rapid development of technology and science. the concerns of securing food, shelter, and competing with other organisms, (including combating the microscopic ones), have all largely been suppressed, possibly to the furthest extent that they can be.

i guess the problem im having is why does water resist when you first press on it? viscosity? hydrodynamic pressure?

6·20·08while everyone else was learning how to deal with their broken hearts, i was trying to figure out what a quantum state was. so i am some what inexperienced in the more human areas. my emotions are somewhat childish, and underdeveloped. i will catch up some day, i believe. it will just take some time, because my experiences with such situations remains sparse.

OH THE IRONY! so youre not angry about being unworthy of showing your body in public, but you are angry about being unworthy of sitting behind a presidential candidate?

you are magnificient. never accept the opinion of anyone claiming anything less.

6·25·08genocidal stupidity.

thats a question for the future, not the present.

6·26·08in my interpretation, moral relativism does not imply that all beliefs are equally 'good', but rather that none of them make any sense without axiom-like definitions of what you are applying your ethical system to. it feels similar to Bertrand Russell's "am i an atheist or agnostic?" essay, in which his opinions as a philosopher misrepresent what a layman's analysis of his opinions would produce. in other words, im a moral relativist, but i do hold moral opinions that i would defend vehemently. but i would tend to fight for acceptance of my axioms, rather than the moral beliefs themselves, which are merely consequences of the axioms.

as scientists, our candor is giving the crazies too much room to argue.

disassociate — space outspaced out

6·28·08cognitive dissonance…

6·29·08okay, collin, ive got it: the reason that walmart and costco are more threatening than apple and google. because apple and google are luxury items, and walmart and costco are basic-needs items. many walmart employees are basically indentured servants, since their wages are so low they can only afford to buy shitty walmart products, and walmart is viable place to purchase such low-cost necessities. if the economy tanks, so does apple, and possibly eventually google. at least, they certainly dont own people the way walmart does.

outline for using GP to verify existence & smoothness of Navier-Stokes equations: step one, generate data; input all necessary parameters into equations, evaluate numerically, store outputs. apply GP to inputs & outputs using general set of operators (this is very analogous to John Koza's 1980s application of GP to orbital data. we have the additional information of seeing if the current solutions are similar to the provided Navier-Stokes equations as well, an advantage! though it seems the nature of the problem is far more complicated than the nature of gravity.

when i get hurt, i dont really know what the appropriate reaction is. im not sure what would be over reacting, and so i just dont react at all. it is surprising how the very lack of a reaction in return can hurt others, antagonistic to my intention.

let those whose every cent of non-necessity material wealth is spent on the needy, cast the first stone.

i am a dark matter skeptic.and a big bang skeptic.and those two beliefs might force me into fringe, which makes me uncomfortable.i guess the root of my skepticism lies in our absurdly brief and insanely limited spatial resolution of observation. imagine looking at a water bugs entire life, swimming around in the water, and trying to infer the nature of fluid dynamics and turbulence and all of the demons that come along with it. the bug is limited, it cant travel very quickly. it cant occupy a very large volume of water, nor can it apply great forces to the water. likewise, galaxies themselves occupy a relatively small amount of space. we have no empirical connection between our understanding of human scale phenomena to galaxy scale phenomena; the only link we have is an assumption that the rules we can measure directly apply to the phenomena we observe (and hence measure indirectly).

between inflationary theory, dark matter, and dark energy, big bang theory appears less well confirmed than it is typically presented.

a kiss for you.

this ought to disqualify us from calling ourselves 'civilized'. or at least make us queasy about it. great britain, france, spain, mexico, china, wait, CHINA? and mexico? we are less civilized that china??? is this a marking point for 'the tables turning'? is it time to cut and run?

wow, awesome. a mormon woman, who believes that gay/lesbian couples should not be parents is going to live with a gay couple who has 4 adopted kids. this is awesome. actually, it was an utter disappointment. when faced with believing her gut feeling and all the good she saw before her, or her nonsensical unfounded and utterly ridiculous beliefs, she very painfully chose her faith. repeatedly people gave her the same good argument for promoting gay couple adoption—because the fewer children who have to live in foster homes, the better—and yet her belief that homosexual love is somehow forbidden by either a book or a deity (whom is no less plausible than Zeus himself) overtook her gut feeling of fairness. people talk about all the good religion has done for the world; please stop believing such nonsense. if you find that difficult, ask yourself how you can know for certain, that whatever good religion brought to someone's life could not have existed without it, and also question whether whatever terrible aspect of their lives may have been related to religion.

upon closer inspection, we begin to see that 'us' and 'them' are one and the same. that we ourselves are the 'they'.

i was thinking today, i tend to fail to appreciate that what i know is somehow special, or unique, or important. i think it is seen quite often in mathematics, the joke that everything that we understand is merely trivial, has some truth to it. its as if the more you learn, the less you appreciate what you know. the more you learn, the more addicted you become to just wanting to learn more. its like any other addiction, the substance and individual experiences of consuming the substance becomes mundane and it is the need for more consumption that drives you. i need a knowledge intervention. i need a girl to come and interrupt thought, which for me, is easiest when a girl is around. certain experiences completely blank my mind from thought, and there is something exciting about that in itself.

where, in the 'good book' does it explain how to sun-dry mud to make bricks to construct your rudimentary home? or how to fertilize your crops best to feed your whole village reliably? or what the optimal mixture of aggregate and cement is to make the best concrete for a certain application? or any other of the uncountable technological advancements we have made since the dawn of civilization that have benefited us and every ancestor before us? religion has given us NONE of these advancements, AT MOST it can be claimed to have provided a moral guidance, which when judged by modern standards of decency should be valued as nothing more than a complete and utter failure. even wild animals often treat one another with far more compassion than humans often do. nature provided us with all the morals we needed in our early stages, and religion fucked that up. we have reached a point with technology where only our brains can provide the moral guidance now demanded by our technology. and religion, as always, continues to only inhibit progress.

why dont you finish what you start?i wish youd tell me what to think.

a lot of default positions that humans take are unreasonable. the first that came to my attention where people asking me why i grew a beard. i had to explain that shaving takes effort, while growing a beard takes nothing. the default position, from a natural point of view, is growing a beard, not shaving. similarly ive found myself in the past, asking, why do i sunburn now when i didnt as a child? other common questions: why do i tire so much more easily, why do i have allergies now, and so on. it is odd, because we always raise these questions in reference to previous states of our lives, but an enormous, obvious, difference between those previous states and our current ones, is that those previous states did not have previous states! we were kids! this all fits well with the questions raised previously about why we should even expect one moment to the next to be similar, let alone predictable. yes, the weather, the stock market, the climate, and our bodies, would all experience marked improvement if a magic key to predictability were uncovered, but why we should expect the existence of such a key in the first place remains the product of wishful thinking solely.

7·2·08wouldnt macgyver be even cooler if every now and then, one of his attempts had failed?or maybe that did happen. i dont remember at all.

shit, maybe its cause im a little inebriated, im too dumb to know; it seems like one way functions should relate to entropy. or maybe i should say, entropy appears to be a physical instance of a one-way-function. intuitively, i would suspect that mathematical one way functions dont exist, but physically, it seems quite apparent. this is good. maybe i can use my physical intuition to align my mathematical intuition ore with the main stream, become less crankish. and succeed some day.

spurred by WIMPs and MACHOwhy are we more comfortable postulating the existence of large quantities of matter which do not interact with the electromagnetic force in any way weve ever seen, rather than postulating that gravity is not quite as simple as we first believed it to be? really, even general relativity is not a far departure from newtonian gravity, in the sense that they were both based on observations of relatively small objects (even the sun is small in comparison to the galaxy, or the local group, or the virgo supercluster, or the general large scale structure of the cosmos. furthermore, the postulate that dark matter (and for that matter, dark energy, and inflationary theory as well) fail to explain many more phenomena! such as peculiar velocity, structure of galaxies (versus motion, the two problems require different amounts and distributions of dark matter). it seems much more likely that we are simply missing something fundamental about the law of gravity at large scales. MOND might be sufficient, it should be looked into carefully.

About Me

I enjoy untying knots. I have a deep and unfounded appreciation for all humankind.
What you see is what you get. Except for politicians. And relationships. And book covers. And land mines. And plot twists. And sink holes. And the media. And fashion. And of course ice bergs too.
I find more things than I should profound. I fall in love with every noun, but it is okay because it is not contagious. I am both deeply superficial and superficially deep.